By Peter Johnson, USA TODAY
After winning her first two weeks and dropping to second place in her third week, CBS' Katie Couric ended the final week of September in last place behind NBC and ABC.
Preliminary Nielsen ratings show The CBS Evening News with 7.5 million viewers, behind NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams (8.2 million) and ABC's World News With Charles Gibson (7.6 million). Final numbers will be released today.

CBS said Monday that the broadcast under Couric, the former NBC Today star, is up 10% or more in 14 demographic categories, and ABC and NBC are down.

Excluding Friday, News viewership is up 22% with Couric, compared with this time last year, when the newscast was anchored by Bob Schieffer.

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I'm certianly no big fan of Couric. However a 22% increase over the same time last year is impressive. The article fails to mention if ABC or NBC has an increase or decrease in viewers. She could be closing the gap on them. The CBS excecutives are likely to estimate that closing the gap will take time.

7.5 million viewers in the basement? How many viewers do the cable news shows have?

CBS EVENING NEWS DOWN OVER YEAR AGO... For the first time since Katie Couric became anchor, CBS EVENING NEWS is down compared to a year ago, falling 4% from 8.069 to 7.758 million last week among total viewers, and the program also declined 9% among adults 25-54 from last year's 2.2 to a 2.0 rating last week... Developing...

I dont think anything would help her... not trying to be disrespectful but she comes off to me as a complete idiot and airhead. Ive heard her notebook moments or whatever, and half the time im just like are you really this stupid? sighs.

Make Mine Torture: Katie Finds a Cause
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on November 21, 2005 - 08:32.
What Princess Diana was to land mines and Bono is to Third World debt, Katie Couric is fast becoming to torture.

For the second time in a few days, Couric has run a lopsided piece on the use of torture in military interrogation.

Last Thursday, Today aired a segment in which three people expressed their views on torture, and, surprise!, they all condemned its use. We first heard from a sensitive soul from "Human Rights Watch." Next was a former CIA lawyer appointed by Bill Clinton, and finally . . . John McCain.

When Katie brought the discussion back into the studio, you might have thought her guest, former FBI official Joe Navarro, was there to provide some balance to the preceding calvalcade of condemnation. But no! Navarro gleefully piled on with yet another condemnation of torture. Katie, renowned interrogation expert that she is, weighed in with her own view that torture yields unreliable information, eventually letting it be known she was in turn relying on . . . McCain!

Katie was back on the torture beat this morning, and back with her was Navarro. Couric began by blithely parroting the allegation by disgruntled former Colin Powell aide Larry Wilkerson that VP Cheney:

"provided the philosophical guidance that led to torture and suggested it may still be going on in US-run facilities."

This is the same Wilkerson who a few weeks ago publicly pouted about "a cabal" between the Vice-President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense, stamping his foot because "the bureaucracy" did not know about all the decisions that were being made.

Powell, himself a MSM fave, rejected Wilkerson's allegations, but for once Katie wasn't paying deference to the former Secretary of State, instead choosing to pass along without further comment Wilkerson's slanderous accusations.

In any case, Navarro was there to demonstrate good interrogation technique by interrogating Katie herself. And by "getting into her personal space" he was in short order able to get Couric to admit . . . that she was from Arlington, Virginia, had earlier in her career worked for a local station in Miami, and would like to visit Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Case closed! If Navarro was able to get Katie to cough up that kind of highly revealing information, surely nothing stronger than a stern look in the eye would ever be needed to get a captured member of Al-Qaida's suicide squad to give up the location of a ticking nuclear weapon hidden in a US city.

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